The advent and explosion of the Internet created a worldwide distributed computing network through which virtually any kind of data may be easily transmitted. For years, bandwidth constraints limited the size of data files that could be transmitted over the Internet within a reasonable period of time. As a result, the Internet was typically not utilized as a transmission medium for the distribution of digital works such as music files, movie files, and high resolution photos. However, as broadband Internet connections like digital subscriber lines and cable modems have become more pervasive, the demand and opportunity for digital works on the Internet have greatly increased. As the demand and opportunity for digital works over the Internet have increased, so has the desire of content producers and owners to provide access to digital works in a secure manner.
Systems have been developed to provide secure access to digital works in distributed computing networks. However, these previous systems suffer from one or more drawbacks that make them undesirable for use in many applications. In particular, many of the traditional systems for providing secure access to a digital work only allow a limited range of security relationships to be expressed. For instance, X.509 certificates may be utilized to verify the identity of a requester of a digital work. However, X.509 certificates require a pre-existing bi-lateral relationship between the requester and the provider of the digital work. Moreover, if an X.509 certificate chain is utilized, the certificate chain must be linear and X.509 certificates cannot be accepted from multiple sources. X.509 certificates therefore suffer from a lack of expressiveness and are not useful for providing secure access to a digital work in many situations.
Other systems for providing secure access to digital works also suffer from drawbacks. Once such problem is the lack of scalability. In particular, some previous systems utilize a central clearinghouse for determining whether access should be granted to a requester of a digital work. These systems typically work well for small networks. However, these systems cannot operate on networks the size of the Internet where hundreds of millions of requests may be received simultaneously, and a central clearinghouse will have problems providing adequate availability. Other systems for providing secure access to a digital work also suffer from similar scalability problems.
Therefore, in light of the above problems, there is a need for a method, system, and apparatus for providing secure access to a digital work that can express a wide range of security relationships. There is a further need for a method, system, and apparatus for providing secure access to a digital work that can scale to the size of the Internet and beyond.